That is all it will be good for after a few day following bug out..Talk is cheap.

When the big one hits us. You carnivore will be shit out of luck.. Big game country will be cross fire heaven.. That generator is not keeping your stores cool.. Better run down to town and pick up some ice for the cooler..

Maybe those veggie heads have some thing going..Run out a get seeds.. Wait 20 weeks to eat.. Storing enough caned food to break the spring on a semi trailer.. should do.. Well a trusty long gun can get a few rodents, aka squirrel/rabbit.. Those damn things have been sick and off the menu for 50 years.

May be learn and practice now to live without electrical stuff and man made fuel..Go to bed at sun set up at sun rise "no lights" or feel around in the dark..

I have been practicing cooking eating almost all dried foods. Cooking on a rocket stove with wood shaving.. Desert brush would do fine.. Stove is made of tin cans.. They are laying around all over the world.. Got a U S Army book of eatable plants on this earth.. In the spring I will be planting some of what we call weeds.

Right now and for the winter.. The house store are full of dry coffee, butter, eggs, milk, flour, corn meal, all kinds of beans and spices. Potato are planted in the compost pile.. Can have a few when needed.

For the winter I have stopped cooking on the rocket stove outside.. Have practiced with the stove.. They really work great.. It only takes a hand full of twigs..

When I lived in Milwaukee Wi. birds in the South Parkway Park were big black crows.. Those sucker were huge.. Then I found they were Magpie. They eat nasty stuff just like crows. Using the rule: You are what you eat.. Think I'll pass on the crow like shit eaters..

In a post-apocalypstic/disaster scenario a generator's a nice luxury to have, at least as long as there's the possibility to periodically get your hands on some fuel. And you've got the means to take it along without it slowing you down if you need to move.

I think carnivores (which are really omnivores, they eat vegetables too) will do just as well as the vegetarians. And probably the vegans (and other exotic dieters) too, they just may not stick to their current regimen. Stocking up on non-perishables is always a good idea, though at a certain point you've either have the ability to haul around that semi trailer or some kind of defensible facility to store it (bunkers, basements, etc). You may also want to stock up on matches/lighters/butane - and depending on how apocalyptic you want to prepare, maybe some flint as well.

unjonharley's post raises an interesting question. If you're prepping, what 'level' are you prepping for? Disaster (short-term outages and breakdowns of society, ie Katrina/Sandy)? Apocalypse (longer-term outages and breakdowns of society, ie Mad Max/Revolution/The Road/etc)? Zombie apocalypse (or for that matter any really good pandemic, ie human-to-human transfer bird flu or ebola)? My girlfriend and I are probably in pretty good shape at the disaster level, but not as much for a full-blown apocalypse or zombies.

Last week a city about 40 minutes water went tits up.. Undrinkable for ten days..For some thing like that, I have a 10 day supply of water. The pantry has a 3 month food supply. Also a five hundred gal. coy pound..

The northwest has had several earthquakes in the past two months.

ps. BBadger, I did not say there were no guns here.. One hand and one 16g. skater should keep the grasshoppers at bay. This ant is being safe..

Don't forget about that lab that was tinkering around with human-to-human bird flu, or recent concerns about an airborne ebola virus. Either is an awesome disaster movie just waiting to happen, but yeah - there's plenty of stuff in the lab and in the wild.

Pandemics and bigger disasters (like Katrina) demonstrate just how fast things can fall apart and people can start freaking out when the going gets rough. During Katrina there were cases of police officers abandoning posts and even becoming looters, as well as hospital staff euthanizing patients (I guess they thought killing them was more humane than letting them die?). Chaos theory suggests that even if you've got a really well designed system, if there are enough variables and strains placed on it that system will not just fail, but probably fail spectacularly.

What is the big one? In the big disaster department, I'm rooting for a really big rock hitting the planet (go big). That way I think we get as many different kinds of doomsday as possible. A big rock would cause massive tsunamis, could also trigger volcanoes around the world to pop, cause a few tectonic plates to shuffle around and serve up earthquakes. Flooding and fires and general overwhelming any kind of emergency services and systems disruption.

We do have a generator.. The power go's out at least twice a year from one thing or another.. We are the last one around here on over head lines. The generator is used twice a day to bring the fridg and freezer up to cold and charge the little gadgets Have a battery operated floor lamp. It is connected to a 75w inverter, battery, a float charger then to the wall outlet..Storage batteries for Burning Man are on a float charger in the shed.. Could run the TV in the evenings and recharge when pumping up the freezer.. Two tins of gas in the shed for the generator plus the gas in the van/car could go a long time.

Apropos of disasters, this struck me in the news this morning -- 14 people at a house party, sucking oxygen and maybe some moldy medical pot, all demanding a busride to General Hospital thinking they had CO poisoning.

Preparing now over later is a far better scenario. Hunting for your food? works great, until there are 6 million other people hunting - the woods and forest will be sterile in a season or two. Water can be filtered, learn how. Gensets are a luxury. We have two. On running on natural gas for the occasional intermittent power outage and a portable. We also have a great supply of canned and dried food. Having an alternate place to live is also sage advice.

mdmf007 wrote:Preparing now over later is a far better scenario. Hunting for your food? works great, until there are 6 million other people hunting - the woods and forest will be sterile in a season or two. Water can be filtered, learn how. Gensets are a luxury. We have two. On running on natural gas for the occasional intermittent power outage and a portable. We also have a great supply of canned and dried food. Having an alternate place to live is also sage advice.

This property has three buildings that can be lived in.. The main house, a guest house 2bdr, kit & shower The shed has a wood stove and all the camp gear .. Al on top of a stone based hill.. No earthquake has disturbed this hill in the last 100 years..now i went and done it

Despite that the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake epicenter was way up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, most of the fatalities were in the lowlands northwards as a result of amplified shaking in the soft mud & fill along the bay, that shook down poorly-braced man-made structures. Then again, it was only a 6.9.

Fishy, in my mind your chair's got all kinds of old school James Bond tricks up its sleeve - guns, rocket launchers, pontoons that pop out of the side, and even an ultralight/helicopter thing (all Road Warrior Gyro Captain style)...

trilobyte wrote:Fishy, in my mind your chair's got all kinds of old school James Bond tricks up its sleeve - guns, rocket launchers, pontoons that pop out of the side, and even an ultralight/helicopter thing (all Road Warrior Gyro Captain style)...

I'm not.My guess is prolonged drought, or other result of climate shift, leading to interruption of the food supply. Bread riots follow.

The world has maybe two or three months of food reserve at any given time. Many of us in the west will be able to buy our way out of it, but Asia and Africa will have dreadful famine, and there will be significant hunger all over.

No need to get freaked out about prophecy...

The Lady with a Lamprey

"The powerful are exploiting people, art and ideas, and this leads to us plebes debating how to best ration ice.Man, no wonder they always win....." Lonesomebri

All the above convinces me that it'd be more important for me to be armed. This isn't a time or place in the world where you go out and hunt and gather after an apocalypse, except maybe at the local stores to gather supplies. You'll be raiding the local supermarket for foodstuff or batteries. More importantly, you're going to be facing looters, gangs, and warlords. You want to be the top of the food chain, and ensure that what you've acquired you can keep and hold.

Hopefully everything goes out in a big bang. Unfortunately, it'll probably just be a normal shortest day of the year.

"The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law." -- Christopher Hitchens

I don't want anyone trying to stamp a label on me.. Like Prepper or what ever..Just watching things like Sandy on the TV shows me that I need to be more self reliant.. No only at Burning Man but here at home 365.. I just took inventory of what I had at the house.. Filled in what I would need. I have alway put up food for the winter. Learned to save seed from Grandmother.. Lived through the hippie years, learned a lot. Been studying all sorts of way off the grid.. Dug up my old boy scouting books and ordered a book on eatable plants.. Then wanted to lose some fat.. So set about cooking better foods.. Found it's cheaper to cook from scratch.Now am playing a game to see how much I can cook/bake without all the additives

Supprise the hell out of my, how much is not needed in our food supply..